sourdough in a bread machine

Q: We got a bread machine for Christmas. How do we use the machine to make sourdough bread?

A: If you make a slurry out of flour and water to the consistency of thin pancake batter, and set it outside for a couple of days to collect airborne organisms floating around in the air, then that will be enough to cultivate with consistent 95℉ heat to a fully active sourdough starter within another twenty-four hours.

The longer the slurry is out there, even if refreshed with new water, then the more complex the culture, the more active, the faster and stronger the culture. The more it endures out there the better. Better to be rained on a few times bringing water from the sky right into it. If it is hot outside then the culture will most likely begin cultivating on its own while it is collecting. On Maui this happens in one day. Within a few hours, actually. Wind blows organisms directly into your slurry and conditions are already perfect. The more wind the better.

If collected in winter and kept from freezing by careful in and out attention, especially if it is windy then the organisms collected over time will be cold-enured. Loaded with organisms that survived extreme cold and revived when conditions improved. This is crucially important when fermenting because the cold storage will have very little affect, it will keep right on going if only a bit slower.

Back inside, the yeast in your jar has a schedule to be fed. Whatever you have there, swirl it around and use a teaspoon of it to inoculate a bowl or jar of fresh slurry and let the inoculated bowl or jar sit there for eight hours at room temperature, and watch it. Observe if it peaks at eight hours or if it continues to rise slowly to the twelfth hour. The faster it reaches peak then the more robust.

Then feed it again with more water and more flour. Observe again at eight hours, but be patient to twelve hours. 

Feed it again with fresh flour and fresh water, doubling the mass with each feeding and you quickly realize you must do something with this, break off the largest portion to bak or discard and continue feeding a smaller amount down to, say, 1/4 cup. Either discard the surplus or add flour to it and salt for a loaf and bake it. One or the other. 

The whole project can quickly get out of hand with regular feedings that double the bulk.

This is what makes sourdough so demanding. It's why bakeries can do it better than home cooks can. It takes too much dedication. 

When the yeast culture you have is fed the organisms gobble up the new food, foam up and peak then fall back. The point where it peaks is your culture's schedule. It can be anywhere from eight to twelve hours. 

You can force the issue and have yeast so powerful and so fast that it peaks within eight hours. Or you can slow to twelve. You force the issue by sticking to a schedule and those organisms that do best on your schedule survive to thrive and predominate. It is a demanding routine and few people are up to it. There is some margin for error, but not much. 

But I learned that all that does not on its own make bread sour. It makes it different, and better, but not sour.

The point of all this regular feeding is to get the starter going full blast on a regular basis, then use it to produce a loaf of bread by adding flour to stiffen it. And right near its peak, because you know your culture so well, cover the dough early and stick it in the refrigerator to chill, to slow down, and to ferment. It must age a few days for the bacteria colonies to grow and develop as much as the yeast has. Get it chilled before it peaks, so the yeast can pick up where they left off once it is out again at room temperature or warmer.

It is the culture starter and the fermentation period that makes the bread sour. This is how you make strong sourdough. You control how strong it is by how long you let the finished dough ferment.And this is how you can get it to be really sour, by extending the fermentation period.

You can do the same thing with commercial yeast, but as a single cell type it will not be as complex, it will be improved but not be very sour.

Sourdough starter is  like a pet. 

One that you occasionally starve, here and there.

It needn't be captured in slurry from air. That's just a way to have sourdough unique to your area. It also starts from the yeast already on the flour. The yeast on the flour that makes the slurry to capture more airborne are fewer in number than in the air, they are combined, duke it out, have a war, and the airborne organism prevail. 

If you have a race between two jars, one plain slurry started fermenting on its own, and another outside collecting more organism, the first one wins the race and makes a fine culture itself, although of uncertain origin. You have no idea whence the grain and neither does the person or company that milled it. Grains are combined to make flour. Sometimes Whole Foods can tell you precisely where their wheat seeds come from. They can order a specific type. Either way, volunteer starter, or active collection starter, the results are worth the effort especially if  you go through a lot of bread. Nothing beats it. Once you get the hang of it, how it behaves. I think it's fun. I don't mind having a pet around for awhile, but that means I'll be cranking out a lot of sourdough bread just as part of keeping the culture at 100% peak activity.

I do this for fun wherever I go. That's why I have about a dozen different cultures in powder form and in frozen powder form, and in thick sludge form, and only one in wet 1qt jar form.

There is another way to use the languishing sourdough culture not at peak activity as flavoring to regular dough made the regular way in the machine. It's a cop out. It is what a lot of bakeries do, merely flavor regular commercial yeast with aged chilled languishing sourdough culture.

Incidentally. the last time I collected a culture, this summer for fun, I left it outside for two weeks. There was a period where it rained lightly every day. I wanted my culture to be strong as can be, and it is.

I talked about this to people at Tony's Market, an upscale market nearby. Even more expensive than Whole Foods, but a dependable bodega. They will have something so unusual as buffalo mozzarella. But things are expensive. Everyone there, from hipster, to jock, to immigrant type, whatever, every person I've talked to there and at Whole Foods too, are totally into their thing. Whatever department you're in, people are eager to talk about things. So I'm talking about this collecting yeast unique to Denver and my careless way of doing it, and the result. The person is 30-something, you'd have no idea that they are really interested. But they are. The questions he asked indicated amazement. He never thought any such thing possible. "It's a way to overcome allergies." 

So I thought what the heck. I have to produce more bread than I can consume when my culture is active. Either that or spill it away to keep the size manageable as I feed it. So I made an extra loaf, wrapped it white dinner napkin as if its a valuable thing, and took it to Tony's Market and gave it to the guy to show him what I am talking about. I went shopping. Returned to the checkout counter. He said by then everyone back there had tried it and were all mightily impressed. It is a very strong sourdough culture that ferments incredibly complexly. It is stunning. They were stunned. 

The guy goes, "I wrapped up what is left and not sharing anymore before it is gone. I'm hogging the rest for myself." 

Then he gave me his employee discount on top of my regular card-carrying discount which reduced my bill greatly, just for sharing my bread. That turned out to be a very profitable loaf of bread. Like $30.00 savings right there.

Plus I blew them away with the knowledge you can collect airborne organisms and cultivate them to produce awesome bread.

Awesome Opossum bread.

But see, all of this runs counter to the convenience of using a bread making machine. Either you are a dedicated baker or not. 

Even so, the guy who runs "Sourdough International" keeps several unique strains separated by continuously  feeding multiple strains and freeze-drying it, uses a bread baking machine too. I do not understand why. After all that, why a machine? It's his preference. I think the loaves come out in the shape of a cube.

When you get used to working with the dough, when you get the feel of it, you find a very wet, very stretchy dough lends itself to closed clay cloche technique for baking. Sort of a tight clay oven within an oven cranked all the way up to top heat. Rocket-hot clay. They can cause the dough to expand to maximum size, when dough is sufficiently wet, with largest internal holes and tight thin toasted skin, a light crunchy crust.

You can get them on eBay, intended for clay-roasting chickens. They have ridges built into the bottom so I use them upside down. I make the most incredible hamburger buns in them. Or a football-size loaf of bread. I have two of these, and a third one for long loaves of bread like a baguette except shorter.

I also have a large unglazed bowl that I turn upside down on a pizza stone to cover a round loaf of bread and contain the heat and the moisture closely long enough for it to expand by heat then toast hard at maximum expansion. They are all excellent. 

This one is $32.00 plus shipping on eBay. I see another one for $10.00. There are similar things. But then, at this point you are dedicated baker and that runs contrary to the convenience of the machine where you toss in the ingredients and it does everything. 

This is the sort of thing I talk to women about to the point that their husbands get mad at me. It happened. But the women are very interested in my discoveries and this is among the best. These three things make my sourdough bread better than what you can buy. It is. Because,

1) my culture comes from right here. It is Denver culture, it suffered many indignities, blew in from parts unknown,  and it is quite extraordinary.

2) it is formed into a loaf at peak activity and chilled before peaking in its cycle to ferment for at least three days, whereas five days is pushing it.

3) brought back to life in a heated kitchen, stretched and formed its yeast redistributed, and finishing its peak activity the refreshed dough  is stretched as it is dropped into a pre-heated cloche, covered and baked at high temperature. Something magical happens inside, the dough inflates like a million dough-balloons inside a dough-balloon providing a stretched skin that toasts.